To give you some background, I’ve been here one season and I haven’t seen a bear in the Park yet. And I do spend some time in the backcountry. When I worked in Sky Lakes one summer as part of a trail crew, I saw one bear, but just the hind end and it was going away. It was later summer and the huckleberries were out. That shows you the difference.
I don’t feel that they’re not here anymore; they’re just wild animals now, which is the way they should be.
And they’re as difficult to see as some wild animals.
I know. But here again, I digress again a little bit, but when I went to Olympic they had a lot of bear damage up there on trees. And there was open season on bears a good deal of the year. I rode the trails a lot in Olympic and I don’t think I saw more than three bears all the time that I was in Olympic National Park. Now we did see one time at our house and because we had the remains of steelhead in the garbage can and he came up and tried to rip that off. So at a place like that you know that there are bears there. So I’m convinced that there are still bears in Crater Lake.
We see tracks fairly often.
Now I trust you are interested in bear stories, but human aspect.
Well, somewhat.
Well, you’re going to get them.
I knew that.
Well, I think my most famous one, and this happened after a good chief ranger came here, Lou Hallock, and an Assistant Chief Ranger by the name of Lee Sneddon. It was in the spring of 1950, when the bears were just coming out the snow banks had dropped enough so they could easily get up on the snow banks. It was right in this area, close to where the service station is, a mother bear and two cubs were beginning to give us problems (9). We had at that time in the ranger force arsenal a small four-ten shot pistol, with a barrel about, I suppose, twelve to fourteen inches long. It was hand held. We used it to just harass bears, it what we did. And that’s all it did. It would just sting them at a distance of 75-100 feet. I don’t think it could do anymore than that. This one bear and two cubs, as I say, were staring to give us trouble. I went down the road and this cub went up at tree out here. It seemed to me like it was 75-feet up in the tree. It probably wasn’t that high, but it was a good 50-feet. It went out on a branch. So I pulled down on that bear with that four-ten shot pistol and let fly. The bear let loose of that limb and dropped to the snow below and it was just as dead as it could be. Dead. That’s all there was to it. Now the only thing I could figure out later on was that the shot had balled up and it was probably an old shot shell just acted as a bullet. I didn’t see where it went in; I didn’t see where it came out. Well, here I was with a dead bear on my hands. Now the superintendent at that time was Ernest P. Leavitt. Now Ernest P. Leavitt didn’t take kindly to anybody shooting his bears. The fact is he took great dislike if his bears were disturbed.
